I Show Not Your Face
by EirienFlower
Summary: Hermione looks in the Mirror of Erised. Written for the Femgenficathon. Contains spoilers for HBP.


Title: I Show Not Your Face  
Rating: G  
Warnings: SPOILERS FOR HBP.  
Prompt: _90. I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.--Helen Keller_  
Summary:1331 words. Hermione looks in the Mirror of Erised. None of the characters or settings belong to me.

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I Show Not Your Face

Sleep didn't come to Hermione on the night of Dumbledore's funeral. She lay awake in the bed that had been hers for six years with the coffin vivid in her mind no matter how she tried to push it away. The coffin, and a new fear in her gut born of the knowledge that _even Dumbledore could die_.

Maybe he hadn't been to Hermione what he had been to Harry - a living, fallible human being - but he had been a symbol, an image of a powerful wizard, a protector. To see the limp shape of his body in Hagrid's arms was like being ripped from comfortable darkness into searing light, from ignorance to the stark and blinding realisation that all things have a weakness.

She wondered what her own would be, and then the memory of Harry and Ron telling her about the Mirror of Erised rose in her mind. The Mirror had showed them their heart's desires -

_- It had shown them their weaknesses._

Hermione thought of the task that she had agreed to do that day by the lake. She was going up against _Lord Voldemort_, the most powerful Dark Wizard ever, and one weakness - one faltering moment - could cost them all their lives, or worse, the war. The enormity of it rose over her, suffocating in the darkness.

Hermione sat up in bed, the better to analyse the bud of a plan that was beginning to form. If she went to the Mirror, if she looked into it, would it make her stronger?

She got out of bed, the bare stones of the floor cold on her feet, and began to pace the room. A long stripe of low moonlight made a kind of path through the dormitory from the window to the door. It felt like a sign. Was it a sign? Hermione had never believed in Divination, in the future written in tealeaves or laid out amongst scattered cards. She believed in facts and cold, irrefutable logic, but in the heavy gloom of midnight that silvery pathway looked as cool and clinical as Occam's Razor.

_If I were the Mirror of Erised,_ she thought,_ where would I be?_ She caught herself thinking, _Not in some dusty old classroom in the first place, _and put a hand over her mouth in fresh grief. It was like speaking ill of the dead.

But remorse and grief didn't solve her problem, which was that she hadn't the first clue of how to find the thing. And yet she had to start somewhere. She just had to _think_. She needed to find that Mirror, she had to know what she would see…

Inspiration hit her like the clichéd thunderbolt: the Room of Requirement of course! Where else did you go if you needed something? She could only hope that the Room worked that way, and, dressing quickly, she wasted no time in creeping out through the empty dormitory and the still Common Room, through the portrait hole and out into the bigger and heavier silence of the Castle.

Darkness and stillness lay thick and oppressive on the Castle tonight, frightening in a way it had never been before. It was as if the presence of Dumbledore had kept away dark things that peeked out now with malevolent eyes from shadowed places, and if you could hide a basilisk and a three-headed dog there really was no telling what lurked in secret passageways or hidden chambers. Hermione wished for Harry's Invisibility Cloak, but in its absence she had to rely on the simpler magics of walking on tiptoes and peeking around corners.

The seventh floor corridor was bare and blank and unguarded when she reached it, the hallway deserted and only her soft footsteps and muffled breath disturbed the silence as she padded three times up and down the corridor, think with all her might, _I need to know what I will see_.

When she turned back for the third time, the wall was no longer bare: a door broke the expanse of grey stone, but it was not the door that had led to the DA's training room. This door was high and gothic, dark and ancient mahogany inlayed with rusting ironwork in ornate curlicues that formed lettering along the high arching top of it.

Frozen, Hermione just stared, resolute and yet uncertain. For a moment she wanted to turn back, uncertain that she could handle knowing, but the remembrance of the thing she would one day have to do spurred her on. Her steps towards the door were slow but firm, and the hand that she reached out trembled in the air for only the briefest of seconds before it gripped and twisted and pushed.

For all its appearance of antiquity, the door swung silently and easily inwards. Beyond it was a plain stone chamber lit by two lances of pale moonlight that sliced into the room from grates set high in the farthest wall, just bright enough to make _Lumos_ unnecessary. Motes of ancient dust swirled lazily, disturbed by the inrush of air and radiant in the silvery glow, but Hermione's eyes were riveted to the high rectangular object concealed by a heavy drape of black silk.

The temperature was perceptibly cooler inside the chamber than in the hallway without, and Hermione's analytical brain surmised that this was not the Room of Requirement at all, but that the Room had acted as a kind of portal to what she most needed. Probably underground, common sense added, but that was neither here nor there.

If the Dark Lord whispered, _"I can give you glory,_" Ron could resist because he knew what his heart's deepest desire was. If to Harry he said, _"I can give you back your family_,"Harry could resist. Without this knowledge, she was the weak link in a chain that must at all costs hold true; she had to look, she had to _know_.

And then she was before the Mirror, hand fisted in the cold weight of the silk covering, and with a gasp she pulled. It slid with a serpent's hiss to puddle in darkness at the Mirror's clawed feet, and Hermione Granger faced her heart's deepest desire.

At first, she had to bite back on a flicker of laughter. How ridiculous! She saw herself, perhaps a little older, and behind her was the stretch of an immense library that faded back an immeasurable length into the hazy depths of the Mirror.

It was knowledge! Her desire was knowledge.

A shaky sigh of relief shivered over her lips and she gave her reflection a brief smile, for the pursuit of knowledge couldn't possibly be a weakness. The reflected Hermione smiled back in a way that was subtly different - perhaps the curl of the lip, the slight arch of one eyebrow. Mirror-Hermione had a hard quality to her.

Hermione bent closer, and she saw the spells overflowing in the eyes of her counterpart, the power sparking at her fingertips and wand, and the books - there was no discrimination in their titles, from _Defensive Magical Theory_ to _Magick Moste Evile.._

It wasn't knowledge; it was _power_, and the power that comes from knowledge

If Voldemort had said, "_I can teach you such things,_" would she not in her secret heart have borne a seed of interest?

How far was she willing to go in order to stop Voldemort, anyway? _Magick Moste Evile_? And how would that have made her any different from Voldemort himself? Books, research: these things were _hers_, her weapon and her strength - her greatest weakness. She thought of all the times she had without thought walked into the Restricted Section and blithely ploughed through the deepest of Dark magic.

But if you know your weakness, you can protect against it. Hermione lifted up her chin defiantly and regarded the image of her possible self in the Mirror.

She would do what she could. And she would not fail.

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**A/N**: This was written for the Femgenficathon on Livejournal. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! Feedback is very, very welecome, be it positive or negative.


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